SHAMBHALA SUN MAy 2009 33
SureLY I aM BeCOMInG a paGan; and not through any
formal rejection or even dubious re-examination of the mystery
of my childhood, Christianity, but more through the evolution
of some closer fit between my spirit and this Montana landscape.
So glorious does this engagement feel some days that I must
confess, in the beginning I wondered if I was not being tempted
somehow by the archetypal devil himself—for surely anything
this pleasurable had to be sinful, even lustful—and worst of all,
placing myself, rather than any God, at the center of things.
I’m not even sure what a pagan is exactly—perhaps I’m mis-
using the word—but yesterday, after I had dropped the girls off
to play at a friend’s house over on the backside of the valley, just
across the state line, in Idaho, I encountered a painted turtle
crossing the gravel road, traveling from one marsh to another,
and my spirits soared, at the life-affirming tenacity of her jour-
ney, her crossing, as well as at this most physical manifestation
that indeed the back of winter was broken; for here, exhumed
once again by the warm breath of the awakening earth, was the
most primitive vertebrate still among us.
It was not a busy road, but I stopped anyway and picked up
the turtle. her extraordinarily long front claws, so like a grizzly’s,
confirmed that she was a female—the longer claws are useful in
excavating a nest in which to lay her eggs—and I put her in a
cardboard box to show the girls upon my return.
I continued on my way, down across the giant Kootenai river
and into Bonners Ferry, to run errands, and then drove back to our
friend’s, where all the children examined the turtle with appropri-
ate and gratifying fascination. They learned the words “carapace”
and “scute” and “plastron,” and a bit of the natural history of the
painted turtle, but what I suspect lodged deepest in their memory
was the mesmerizing hieroglyphics, or cartography, of red and
orange swirls on the underside of the shell; and the image that
probably went deepest into either their consciousness or subcon-
scious, into the matrix of memory and formative identity—or so
I hope—was the three of us stopping on the trip home to release
the turtle on the other, safe side of the road, pointed down toward
the larger marsh—the direction she had been headed—despite the
fact that there was still no traffic.
We kept watch over her then, as she slithered her way through
last autumn’s dead grass, and the newly emerging green-up, to-
ward the cattails and chilly dark waters that would receive her
and the future of her kind.
I hoped the specific tone of sky at dusk, the call of snipe cir-
cling overhead, and the shapes of these specific mountains—
these mountains—were imprinting themselves, this one april,
as deeply in the minds of my young daughters, along with this
leisurely, almost nonchalant yet considered act, as deeply as
the chemistry of a river is said to imprint itself upon the bod-
ies of young salmon. These are the sights and scents and tastes
and sounds and textures, the logic and the reason, that hope-
fully will help form the matrix of their childhood and their
individual characters.
I’m grateful to that one turtle for the opportunity to help show
them consideration. I’m grateful to the color of that sky at dusk,
and to the unique and specific shape of haystack Mountain, to
the north, and to the scent of the pine and fir forests, early in the
spring, for helping form that calming matrix, as sense-filled and
tangible as a bough of fir branches spread beneath one’s sleeping
bag on a camping trip far back into the mountains, the mythic
mountains of childhood
We stood there and watched her clamber on down into the
dark waters. We don’t have turtles in our marsh. Our marsh is
one of several in a chain of wetlands that is perched at the edge
of an upthrown fault block that parallels the valley’s main river.
The closest turtles are but a quarter of a mile away, down in
one of the huge wetlands created by the river’s high waters each
spring; but there are no turtles in any of the marshes on that
shelf up above the valley—the shelf on which our marsh, and
several others, is perched.
We are a hundred feet too high, it seems, for turtles—an
elevation of thirty-three hundred feet, rather than the valley
floor of thirty-two hundred. Maybe, however, the warming
earth will allow this marsh to receive them in my lifetime. Or it
ILLuSTraTIOnBYTOnYMaTTheWS
The Turtle Where do spirituality and environmentalism meet?
rick baSS on the wonder of releasing a painted turtle on the safe side of the road.